NYCC 09: Roogoo: Twisted Towers Hands-on

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Time to match shapes by flinging them across the environment.

By Greg Miller

The Wii takes a lot of crap in hardcore circles. People complain that there aren't enough games, and people complain that there's too much shovelware. It's those people that need to stand up and take a look at Roogoo: Twisted Tower, a shape-matching games that's so much more complicated than it sounds.

Not familiar with Roogoo? It was originally an Xbox Live Arcade game, but now it's getting ready to land on the Nintendo DS as Roogoo Attack! and on the Wii as Twisted Towers. The basic idea is pretty simple. Discs are suspended in the air. Shape cutouts are made in the discs. Shapes fall from the sky, and you have to rotate the discs one at a time so that the falling shape glides though the corresponding hole. The shapes stack on the lowest disc, and a level is complete when you've completed a tower of pieces for every shape.

I'm sure it sounds easy, but it's not -- at least not after awhile. Sure, the first levels are simple enough wither their bright colors and cute characters (the bright bear-looking guys are Roogoos and the dark ones are evil Meemoos) but as you delve deeper into the games close to 90 levels, things get hairy. When you think you've got the rotating of platforms down, you have to deal with two shapes coming at once. When you think you've got two shapes at once covered, you have to deal with learning to catch things in your motion-controlled butterfly net. When you've go the net down, you have to deal with level bosses.

Yes, while the DS version is just straight levels, Roogoo Twisted Towers has a number of bosses who are going to make stacking your pieces that much more difficult. The first creature I ran into was Barry Von Pire, a caped Meemoo that sucked the color from shapes and discards their husks next to his coffin bed. While I'd be trying to guide my pieces to the lowest platform, Barry would transform into a bunch of bats, fly out to the platforms, and start snatching my pieces. When this happened, I needed to point my Wiimote at the screen, target the bats, and then tap A to swing a hammer and nail the flying rats. The nocturnal beasts would then drop the pieces, and I had the chance to catch the falling goodies with my motion-controlled butterfly net. After each bat attack, Barry would appear beside the platforms in his cape, and I had the chance for a few more hits. Oh, and yes, you're still guiding pieces down the whole time this it happening

The next boss that I ran into was King Charlie. While playing some snowy platforms set above an icy lake, a rumbling started and Charlie rose from the water. A massive abdominal snowman, Charlie sat up in the water and dwarfed my platforms. As the pieces fell and I tried to maneuver my platforms, Charlie would grab the spinning discs and change their rotation. It would be up to me to get them back where I wanted before the next piece fell. As the level went on, Charlie started blowing out an ice breath that froze my screen so that I had to wipe it down with a motion-controlled hand to be able to see. Worse, the breath also turned my pieces blue. The color change might not seem like much, but after levels and levels o matching green triangles with green triangle-shaped holes, dropping something blue in there just doesn't feel right. As a final segment, his highness got angry, grabbed one of my platforms, and hurled it behind him. When the time came to complete the level, I had to shoot my pieces over Charlie's head and avoid his jumping grasps.

Get the stake ready...

If you get tired of bosses, there are another couple of options for you to take on. One kind of level is skydiving, and it has you falling a set path but dodging metal balls, shooting enemies with blue stars, and collecting shapes. Of course, there is a multiplayer component that puts four players in a race to complete a twisting tower first while making it through enemy attacks that slow down and speed up the rate of the falling pieces.

Just like the DS Roogoo I played, Roogoo: Twisted Tower is a simple idea with some hectic moments that leads up to a good time. Folks looking for puzzle games to play with other should take note.